Re: [ublas] Status of development /Benchmarks

Subject: Re: [ublas] Status of development /Benchmarks
From: David Bellot (david.bellot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-07 05:38:56

Hi,

it has been a long discussion we all had for many months now. Should we
rewrite ublas from scratch or simply improve it.
Joaquim and Oswin wants a brand new ublas
Nasos was more in favor of improving it.

I personally find very exciting the idea of writing something new, but
ublas is very well known now. On the other hand, Eigen and Armadillo took
the crown of the main C++ blas library in users' hearts.

On my todo list for ublas, there are things that will require ublas to be
deeply changed. At this stage, we can almost talk about a new library.

Christmas is very close now, so maybe it's a good time to start talking
about the features we wish for ublas and see if they can be implemented
with the current version or if a new uBLAS 2.0 is necessary.
After all, Boost::signal did the same a few years ago. We can definitively
do the transition.

I begin:

- unified representation of vectors and matrices to represent the fact that
a vector IS a matrix. Matlab does the same
- automated use of different algorithm to let the compiler "chooses" the
best implementation (if possible) and switch on SSE, distributed or whateve
we need
- implementation of solvers and decompositions algorithms

and this is what Nasos and I think should be integrated too:
1. Matrix multiplication
2. Algorithms infrastructure (so that we can have real useful features)
3. Matrix/vector views for interoperability <- I think this is ultra
critical because now ublas is monolithic in the sense that you have to use
it everywhere you manipulate data. This would really help into letting
people for example have a list of vectors (they are plotting) and ublas
working on top of that to do for example transformations
4. NEW DOCUMENTATION - examples and the rest
5. Incorporate some critical bindings (i.e. mumps bindings which is
currently probably the most efficient smp and distributed open source
linalg solver)
6. matlab binding?
7. distributed ublas

Please add and ESPECIALLY, please tell me your view on the current
infrastructure of uBLAS. It seems many people are not happy with the
current "expression template" grammar.

I'm open to everything

Best,
David

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Joaquim Duran <jduran.gm_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I think that al stuff pending of merge listed by David, should be merged
> and migrate to uBlas 2.0 and while uBlas 2.0 is in development/maintenance
> then design from scratch uBlas 3.0.